High Concentration of Hartford's H1-B Workers Are Employed By Outsourcing Firms

Hartford's skilled immigrants more likely to work for outsourcing firms than in rest of New England

In metro Hartford, nearly a third of temporary visas for skilled workers, known as H1-B visas, are requested by businesses that provide outsourcing and consulting services to other companies, according to a new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

That's the highest proportion of any city in the Northeast, the study said. By contrast, only 10 percent of Boston's H1-B applications were from outsourcing companies.

Robert Clifford, author of the study that came out Wednesday, said he wanted to learn more about how H1-B visas are used in New England because our region has the most highly educated immigrant population of any part of the country.

He said he wanted to explore the question: "What are the policies that could attract and retain these individuals?"

When outsourcers bring Indian immigrants to do information technology work in the United States, those immigrants rarely have a chance to stay for the rest of their careers, unless they find another employer willing to sponsor them before their six-year visa is finished.

These companies — Indian firms such as Wipro, Infosys, Tata as well as Cognizant and Deloitte — rarely sponsor green cards for the immigrants who work for them, Clifford said.

For instance, according to myvisajobs.com, Deloitte brought close to 1,800 workers on H1-Bs to America in 2014, but only sponsored 27 green cards.

He said another issue is that while they provide some services onsite, they send other work to India. In Cognizant's case, the majority of its technical staff work in India, and they do work for insurers both onsite and offshore on the same projects.

Still, Clifford said he cannot say that the concentration of visas among outsourcing firms is a problem with the program.

"There could be positive effects from the role of outsourcers," he said. "Instead of focusing capital on IT labor force, they may be better able to invest in the core line of business."

There is a 65,000 cap on the number of H1-B visas that can be issued every year, though there are two loopholes — 20,000 more applicants can receive the visas if they graduated from a master's program in the United States that year, and nonprofits are not subject to the cap.

Yale is the fourth-biggest sponsor of H1-Bs in New England, after Infosys, Wipro and Patni Americas, according to the report. On average, it requested 306 visas a year between 2010 and 2012.

Not all requests are filled, but Clifford said this was the best data available for local geographies.

Clifford said no one knows how many people are currently working in the U.S. on H1-B visas, because the data is kept by more than one agency and is not organized.

However, his study found that on average between 2010 and 2012, there were 1,358 requests for H1-B visas for computer professionals in metro Hartford, where there were 18,960 people working in the field — or about 7 percent of the industry.

That proportion of applications to workforce is lower than in Fairfield County, which is one of the top 10 urban areas in the country in intensity of H1-B demand.

His paper did not say which Hartford firms rely most heavily on these outsourcing companies, but the U.S. Department of Labor documented cases from The Hartford, Travelers, Cigna, Prudential and Mass Mutual in the last five years where local workers (including IBM contractors) lost their jobs because the work was sent to outsourcing companies in India.

Some critics of the program say that the younger, cheaper workers on H1-Bs are driving down wages for native IT professionals. Clifford said there isn't clear evidence that's happening.

Companies that apply for H1-B visas do not have to show that they tried to find a U.S. worker and couldn't.

Clifford said the program is often misunderstood, because he said, the political argument for raising the cap is often made that "we have a skill shortage."

He said policymakers should examine the program and think about what problem it's designed to solve. Is it a way to recruit the most talented scientists and technical minds to America? If so, maybe a point-based system would be more effective, as Canada uses.

Is it a way to help tech companies fill jobs? Clifford suggests then the cap should fluctuate by openings and unemployment rates.